ScholarWorks@동국대학교

초록

The act of recollection is a prevalent theme in Wordsworth’s poems. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” he reflects on recollections of the past, and in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” he recalls his past visit to Tintern Abbey and encourages his sister, Dorothy, to recollect the visit in the future. When Wordsworth states that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, he emphasizes the significance of recollection in creating poetry. This paper aims to demonstrate that Wordsworth’s recollection does not involve recovering the past as it was but rather repeating the past in the sense of Kierkegaardian repetition. In his book Repetition, Kierkegaard argues that recollection finds the past that already exists but has been forgotten. In contrast, through repetition, the individual renews or recreates the past in relation to their subjectivity. Therefore, recollection is oriented towards the past, while repetition is oriented towards the future. The former is a process of being, whereas the latter is a process of becoming, since repetition involves bringing something new to the past, renewing the past through the inward movement of subjectivity. In his poems, Wordsworth also tries to repeat the past, not by recovering it as it was, but by recreating it. In “Tintern Abbey,” for instance, he does not strive to preserve the past as it was but rather to repeat the past by adding something new, which is the process of becoming. In the note to “The Thorn,” Wordsworth describes “repetition and apparent tautology” as “beauties of the highest kind.” The repetition of the word “misery” in the poem can effectively convey the speaker’s profound suffering, as the same words are repeated in prayer without causing any redundancy. Wordsworth further emphasizes the power of repetition by citing a verse from the Old Testament: “Awake, awake Deborah! awake, awake.”

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